THE state is waging a one-sided war against the people of Islamabad. To be clear, only against those Islamabadis who have had the misfortune of being born too poor to ascend into the land-grabbing, rent-seeking elite. The Capital Development Authority, and its powerful backers eyeing prime potential real estate, have been on a roll. Nurpur Shahan. Saidpur. Muslim Colony. Allama Iqbal Colony. Rimsha Colony. Nowhere is off the table, and anywhere can become the next gilded nouveau riche dream. The only ones in the way are the wretched of the earth who happen to live there.

The city’s administration and law-enforcement authorities have already reduced thousands of houses and entire markets to rubble — ensuring people lose not just homes, but livelihoods as well. Anyone who has resisted has been arrested; the perpetrators have been awarded state honours. It seems, finally, that the decision to rid Islamabad of its poorer citizens has been taken in earnest.

While mainstream coverage has been dismal, visuals of the carnage have flooded social media. And the jarring juxtaposition against the One Constitution building was not lost on anyone. After a botched attempt at getting those premises vacated, it took the prime minister of the country less than 24 hours to intervene and announce the formation of a committee to review the case. Meanwhile, in the shadows of the skyscraper, Nurpur was being erased from the face of the earth. Such incidents only reinforce the belief that legality and illegality are concepts entirely open to interpretation by the powerful. And there could be no clearer indication of whom the state serves.

The government claims it has already compensated the earlier generation of residents in Saidpur and Nurpur (with a pittance, as it were), and all others who have arrived since then are encroachers and squatters. This claim is disputed by many who live there today, who say they have not been compensated adequately or at all. This also does not change the fact that families who have lived in these villages since before there was Islamabad — or Pakistan, for that matter — are being vacated from ancestral lands overnight.

It seems that a decision has been taken to rid Islamabad of its poor.

There are several other important questions left unanswered. Was it not the responsibility of the state to manage this over the several decades that have passed? Where was the city administration when these settlements were expanding and new ‘encroachments’ were taking place? What about similar ‘encroachments’ that are taking place in other parts of Islamabad right now? Will anti-encroachment drives take place across the board, including against private developers and state institutions? Are there any low-income alternatives provided to ensure people don’t need to resort to squatter settlements in the first place? What about the widespread allegations of under-the-table rent-seeking from these very settlements by the city administration? And if they’ve been illegally squatting on government land all along, why did they build roads and schools there and provide utilities?

More fundamentally, what does the state need this land for anyway? There was a time when the CDA’s official plan was to bring the formal to the informal in localities like Nurpur or Saidpur. Today, it has deemed it easier to demolish the informal entirely for a different vision of development — a new city with a skyline that’s “a mix of Shanghai and Manhattan”, where plots and profits are in the billions, where big cars drive along wide signal-free highways, and conspicuous consumption has eradicated any signs of poverty. It is a failure of our ur­­ban governance system that the entire landscape of a city can be altered by the fla­­shy visions of people passing throu­­gh corridors of power.

But let’s assume the state desperately needs this land, and let’s ignore why. Do we have some kind of plan for where 30,000 native residents of Islamabad will go once they’re left homeless? Where are the community initiatives and town halls to build trust and develop a phased plan that works for everyone? Where are the systematic lists of compensation paid that reflect contemporary land values? If these settlements are so unplanned, where is the alternative planned settlement that has been created for them? Working with the community is an obligation for the government, not an optional nice-to-have.

Islamabad has been in the global news lately for different reasons. But a mere three kilometres away from where we were playing peacemaker to the world, we were terrorising our own. It says something about us as a nation if we normalise squashing the weakest among us, as long as we can be seen to be strong by others. Pakistan’s moment in the spotlight means nothing if we continue to choke our most vulnerable in the shadows.

The writer is a sustainable urban development specialist.

Published in Dawn, May 30th, 2026